


in black and white (is all that i hold dear)

by airplanetrails



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Belonging, Bucky Hates Cameras, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Photography, Pining, Post-Captain America: The First Avenger, Post-Serum Steve Rogers, Steve Does Photography, Steve Rogers Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers and the 21st Century, Steve Used To Draw, Stucky - Freeform, Tony Stark Is Done With These Idiots
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-26
Updated: 2016-09-28
Packaged: 2018-05-16 10:13:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5824633
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/airplanetrails/pseuds/airplanetrails
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"If you want to learn what someone fears losing, watch what they photograph."</p><p>Steve finds meaning in photography after losing everything but his life in the twenty-first century. But cameras cannot capture what has been lost, at least not until what has been lost returns with a metal arm and broken memories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Got stuck with my other story so this happened...

It had been 70 years since Steve had last picked up a pencil and drawn, the way it used to come to easy to him. But it somehow seemed wrong. Sitting in this foreign house in a chair that was too soft, that made him miss the rickety chair that he used to pull up next to the window in their draughty apartment. Staring at his gleaming new pencil poised over the paper, just hovering but he couldn’t bring himself to draw anything. 

It was a strange thing, staring at a blank page. 

Drawing had always come to Steve the way words had come to Bucky, like fresh water through fingers, flowing free. The lady on the street whose son died in the war, the man smoking at the corner, Peggy, Bucky, Bucky, Bucky. He used to burn through sketchbook faster than he could afford to replace them. But when Bucky would notice and ask why he wasn’t curled up drawing again, he would always laugh, that fake laugh that he never could really pull off and say “I just don’t feel like it” or “Can’t think of anything”, lying straight through his teeth. He could have and had filled book and books of Bucky, his eyes, his smile, his dog-tags, him in his uniform, him laughing, him all cleaned up to go dancing. 

Bucky would always play along, but somehow the next day Steve would always find a new sketchbook tucked under his pillow. If Bucky ate just a bit less for the next few weeks, less potatoes, less bread, he never said and Steve just tried to force himself to swallow his share knowing what Bucky was doing. But he knew it was no good trying to bring it up because they would just argue, like the countless times it had already happened. So Steve drew, drew Bucky so many times over, as if it could cover even a fraction of the gratitude he owed Bucky, drew him even when he was at the frontline, from memory. He just drew and _drew_ , as if it were a talisman to keep Bucky safe forever. And they played their careful dancing around each other in perfect balance until they both died and came back different people. 

When Steve got back, and found that he couldn’t draw. It felt like he had died all over again. There was nothing to ground him, to remind him of who he was. A name was not enough, he had no friends, no home. He was lost and he drifted. Countless psychologist and therapists could do nothing about the blank emptiness behind his eyes, the way he walked through his new life, if you could even call it that, in a daze, the way ever night he went back to the house and ignored the bed with all it’s starched sheets for the cold floor, as if it could bring back his past. 

He didn’t understand the way people spoke, all the slang, all the short forms, all the lack of formalities. He didn’t know the difference between macchiato and cappuccino and all the other mutant offspring off the good ol’ cuppa. He couldn’t figure out the newfangled phone that fit into his pocket, the internet. He was a fish floating in outer space and he felt like he couldn’t breath. The world seemed to march past him in power suits and towering heels, yelling into a earpiece while balancing breakfast and coffee in both hands. So he wandered. Reconnaissance, he told himself. Every day a new path, searching for something he didn’t know. Until he came to a park, just a few yards from his apartment and he had no idea how he missed it. But there, it seemed like nothing had changed, trees, wooden benches, lovers strolling hand in hand, the birds chirping the same tunes. 

For once it felt like he could breath and the new world smelled like freshly cut grass and autumn leaves.


	2. building a home

Every morning he would sit at the park, on a bench he had come to think of as his bench, even though really, it was public property. Facing the playground, he would watch as children screamed and laughed - some things never changed. His life stayed pretty much the same after that, every morning to the park, then he would hang around with Sam whom he had meet while jogging at the same park, then he would go home and watch the news or whatever was on TV. It was boring but it was familiar, easy repetition like walking, like marching, like loading a gun, like saying "I'm okay."

 

His routine was suddenly derailed, when he saw a man sitting at HIS bench from a distance. A part of him flared up in anger; really it was strange to feel anger or really any emotion over such a minuscule matter, but his therapist said that it was normal. Normal to feel strong emotions especially after such a traumatic event. He guessed waking up in a completely different world constituted a traumatic event and he had come to see the bench as some form of a safe place. But his rational side took over as he walked towards the playground - that bench was big enough for two anyway. 

“You mind if I take a seat?”

“Not at all. Let me just move my camera.”

The man shifted over, lifting up a tiny bag,which was suppose to be his camera? Intrigued, Steve watched as the man deftly assembled the machine, screwing on a tube and flicking a switch. 

“You interested in photography?” the man suddenly asked, turning away from his camera to look at Steve, 

“No actually I used to draw a lot. But...” Steve blurted out then trailed off, not sure why he would be telling this man his whole life story.

“Well here, have a go! It’s my favourite camera, first one I bought for myself actually. Trying to take pictures of my son over there before he grows up and starts ignoring me.” the man chuckles, handing over the camera that felt to small and fragile in Steve’s hands. He fumbled slightly, trying to get this grip right. The man was patient, and taught him how to look into the viewfinder, how to steady your hand for a shot, how to wait for the shutter to click before moving. He suddenly understood where the myths that said a picture would capture part of your soul came from, because it felt awfully a lot like he was about to shoot someone. Steve wondered if this was what Bucky felt, aligning his crosshairs on his target, like the world had ceased to exist beyond the finder scope. 

He took his first few clumsy shots of the playground and the man showed them through the screen, he saw the laughter and joy on the children’s face frozen in time. Captured to savour for all eternity. It felt like he had a time machine in his hands. Like he could just freeze time when it became to fast, which it certainly had felt like recently.

“Daddy!” a little boy, presumably the man’s son, came over interrupting his train of thoughts, and tugged at his dad’s pant leg. The man ruffled his hair saying “Come on give a smile for Daddy”, as he pointed the camera at the boy and the shutter clicked as the widest gap toothed smile along with some drool appeared on the boy’s face. 

“Hey where can I get one of these cameras?”

“Oh I got mine at a little shop near the pizza place just down the street, you know it’s called Flash Emporium. The guy who works there, Nicholas is a real nice guy, he’ll help you get what you need.”

“Thank you for...this. I’ll be off then.” Steve awkwardly gestured and hastily made his exit, somehow eager to get his hands on one of those cameras. The first thing in this new age that had actually interested him. Well there was a first time for everything and Sam had been pestering him to get a hobby. 

2 hours later he walked out of the shop with a entry level camera, as Nicholas had put it. None of the bells and whistles that the more expensive cameras had. A point and shoot camera. It was more than enough really. Steve began by bringing it to his daily morning runs, taking pictures of the birds, the trees, a nice shot of his bench. He would bring it to the neighbourhood photograph shop and a few minutes later he would have a few glossy shots to add to the increasing number that he had pinned to his wall. 

It wasn't much. Just additional steps in his routine, more colour on the drab walls, something to fill the phantom ache that drawing had left in his hands - craving for charcoal, a pencil, a warm calloused hand. 

When Stark got wind of his new hobby, after trying to offer Steve a prototype of some mutant camera he was building, he pulled out a vintage looking camera, the kind that look vaguely familiar to Steve. It had a clasp to open the camera to add rolls of film to be developed. Mumbling about it having been his hobby too, he shoved it into Steve's hands and shooed him out of his workshop. 

That was the real beginning of Steve’s spiral into photography, even as he slowly embraced the world around him, capturing it behind the lens. Where the camera had once been his shield from the world, it had become a part of him he couldn’t let go, even when he no longer needed a shield. It was the first real link he had felt to this new world and he had always been a sentimental person. His spare room became a dark room, the red light and smell of chemicals became somewhat therapeutic, and the photos that had colonised his wall over his bed, had spilled over to the strings that hung criss-crossed over the room, flapping in the wind with flashes leaves, steaming coffee cups and numerous pictures of the Avengers in their natural habitat, laughing. 

It wasn't home, but it was close enough.


End file.
